View full sizeMike Greenlar / The Post StandardPyramid Companies gets a $66,000-a-year tax savings for calling this space a fallout shelter. The room is located in the parking garage for Bridgewater Place in Franklin Square.

Syracuse, NY -- In the bowels of a private parking garage in Syracuse's Franklin Square, a rusty steel door creaks open to reveal a very expensive storage room.

Bricks are piled in one corner. Office doors are stacked against a concrete wall. A ladder, lawn-care equipment, pallets and pieces of furniture are strewn about.

Built in 1991, the room has cost the city more than $1.2 million so far.

That’s how much the parking garage owners have avoided in property taxes because — on paper anyway — the storage room is also a fallout shelter.

The parking garage attached to the Bridgewater Place office building is the last garage in New York state still claiming a tax exemption for providing shelter from nuclear bombs.

For the past 19 years, companies associated with developer Robert Congel have paid no property taxes on the $1.7 million garage, thanks to a windowless underground room on the garage’s lower level that measures 16 feet by 59 feet.

Congel is better known as the developer of the Carousel Center shopping mall and the Destiny USA project, both of which received 30-year property tax exemptions under

deals Congel negotiated with Syracuse officials.

The 20-year tax break on the Franklin Square parking garage will end next year. Until then, the city taxes only the land value of the property, assessed at $205,500.

This year, the exemption will save the garage owners roughly $66,000.

In return, city taxpayers get a locked, unmarked storage room inside a parking garage they are not allowed to enter. Signs at the entrance warn visitors the garage is for Bridgewater Place tenants only.

“No trespassing,” the signs say. “Violators will be prosecuted.”

The Syracuse city council adopted the state-authorized tax exemption for parking garage fallout shelters in 1960. Over the decades, officials used it routinely to encourage parking garage development.

But David Clifford, commissioner of assessment, said it’s time to retire the tax break. He said he will ask the council soon to repeal the local law.

“It’s one of those archaic exemptions that really shouldn’t be on the books anymore,” Clifford said. “It’s way outdated.”

Arguably, the exemption was already outdated in 1991 when Franklin Square Parking Corp., founded by Congel, applied for it. The Soviet Union disbanded in 1991. Two years earlier, the Berlin Wall had come down.

Dennis Michalski, speaking for the state Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services, said state officials have not promoted fallout shelters since the late 1970s.

“We don’t have fallout shelters anymore,” he said.

Onondaga County maintains a list of shelters for storms, floods and other emergencies, but stopped mapping fallout shelters long ago, said Joe Rinefierd, deputy commissioner of emergency management. Many young people don’t even recognize the term, he said.

“If you walk up to somebody 19 years old and ask them what a fallout shelter is, that would be like asking them to use a rotary-dial phone,” Rinefierd said.

Franklin Square incentive
None of that really mattered in 1991. The Bridgewater Place garage got a tax break to help stimulate development in Franklin Square, not to protect people from nuclear fallout, said Vito Sciscioli, a former economic development official at City Hall.

Sciscioli said the shelter exemption was “an anachronism,” but the city probably would have provided some other incentive if that weren’t available.

At the time, Franklin Square was a blighted, post-industrial wasteland. Bridgewater Place — then the abandoned Plant No. 2 of departed New Process Gear — was a derelict hulk inhabited by vagrants.

“What I am going to say, you shouldn’t give them a tax incentive for the parking?” Sciscioli said. “If you want to do something with this stuff, you have to provide subsidy and incentive, because (otherwise) it’s contrary to the market.”

Parking facilities are money-losers in a city like Syracuse, where construction and maintenance typically cost more than what customers will pay to park, Sciscioli said. Municipal officials often subsidize parking to promote downtown development.

As an offshoot of Congel’s development of the original Carousel Center mall, he and his partners undertook ambitious renovations of several buildings in nearby Franklin Square. David Aitken, speaking for the developer, said those efforts sparked positive growth in a once-neglected area.

“Franklin Square is a great example of smart growth (and) new urbanism, where vacant buildings slated for demolition were adaptively reused,” Aitken wrote in an email.

Bridgewater Place, which Congel and his partners transformed into an attractive seven-story office building, had a tax subsidy separate from the parking garage. For 15 years beginning in 1989, the owners made reduced payments in lieu of taxes to the Syracuse Industrial Development Agency, an arm of city government.

The garage next door was owned by Franklin Square Parking Corp. until 2007, when it was sold to Vinum Parking Garage LLC. Both companies share the 4 Clinton Square address that is also home to Congel’s Destiny USA and The Pyramid Cos.

A Cold War survivor
In 1956, the state Legislature passed the Defense Emergency Act, declaring a need to develop fallout shelters because “the aggressive forces of communism are employing threats of nuclear attack to achieve their plan and purpose of world domination.”

Shortly thereafter, state tax law was amended to provide exemptions for parking garages that included underground fallout shelters. From the beginning, it seemed clear that the emphasis was on parking.

Garages only qualified if they provided sufficient parking spaces. In New York City, the minimum was 250 spaces. It was 150 in Syracuse and Utica, 75 in smaller cities.

The law did not specify how many people the fallout shelters should house.

Syracuse is more generous with fallout shelter exemptions than many municipalities, state tax officials say.

According to guidelines provided to assessors by the state Office of Real Property Tax Services, parking garages with shelters should be exempt from city taxes but not school or county taxes. In Syracuse, however, the exemption applies to all three.

ORPTS spokesman Geoffrey Gloak said the office’s interpretation of the law is not binding on local officials.

A shelter at Syracuse University
Congel’s company was the last in a series of Syracuse garage owners to claim the bomb shelter exemption.

In 1984, the Sheraton Syracuse University Hotel got an exemption for its parking garage after the developers included a fallout shelter that was 16 feet wide and 18 feet long. Under regulations established in 1967 by the now-defunct state civil defense commission — rules that are still on the books — that’s enough space for 26 people.

The hotel operator at the time cut about 20 percent off its tax bill thanks to the fallout shelter, Clifford said. The exemption expired in 2004.

Syracuse University bought the hotel in 2000 and now pays a tax bill of more than $500,000 a year on the property.

Building engineer Pete LaPage, who has worked at the hotel since 1992, said the fallout shelter was used for storage as long as he can remember.

“I’ve been here 19 years, and it’s been used for a storeroom since I’ve been here,” LaPage said.

No flashlights
When Congel’s Franklin Square Parking Corp. applied 20 years ago for the tax exemption, a certified fallout shelter analyst from the state Emergency Management Office inspected its parking garage shelter.

Recently, James Bell, the building manager at Bridgewater Place, unlocked the shelter for a reporter and photographer. Amid the clutter, the room still showed some evidence of civil defense planning.

A small, L-shaped cinderblock wall extended out into the room from the original doorway, a baffle intended to reduce radiation exposure. Two side-by-side bathroom stalls made of 6-foot-high plywood still stood against the wall, with bare concrete floor beneath them.

But there was no sign of the 1,000 “disposable liners” — needed as portable toilets — that were called for in the architectural drawings. Nor was there any sign of the three lanterns, 10 flashlights or 120 water buckets called for in the plans.

Clifford said part of the reason he wants the city to repeal the tax exemption is that nobody is responsible for regulating fallout shelters.

“There’s no real way to inspect these things,” Clifford said. “There’s no fallout shelter police.”